Pittsburgh Owlscribe – On Sunday it felt like I spent the day in a cultural time machine. The day started off in the early to mid-1700s in England, where I absorbed the drama of a one-man play titled The Return of Benjamin Lay.
Unfamiliar with the main (and only character), I watched and listened to a truly remarkable story of a feisty, 4-foot-tall adventurous man, who left a comfortable life in rural England by joining the rough, tumble and dangerous career as a tar in a British merchant ship.
The play spends a good 20 minutes recalling in the first person Lay’s experiences sailing the world, mixing tidbits of humor and old shanty songs with gripping tales of peril on a sailing ship plying the sometimes-adversarial moods and caprices of the sea.
On shore leave, the diminutive sailor spotted an attractive short female named Sarah, whom he eventually married and emigrated with to Barbados. There he saw close up and personal, the cruelty of the slave trade that poured wealth into the coffers of the island’s sugar plantation slave owners while, at the same time, severely oppressing the lives of their subservient laborers.
One particular episode that followed, an unsuccessful slave rebellion, is retold with grisly, stomach-churning realism. Lay’s experience with the day-to-day ethical offenses of slavery was so visceral he became an early Abolitionist. A Quaker, he subsequently relocated to Philadelphia, where Quakerism played a significant role in the city’s religious life.
Did you know that William Penn, the commonwealth’s founder, owned 12 slaves and that some of the local Quakers also engaged in the practice? After moving to Pennsylvania, Lay took on his fellow Quakers and defiantly challenged their slaveholding ways, charging them with apostasy, avarice and greed.
Eventually, Lay was expelled from the congregation in a sort of Quaker version of excommunication. The last half of the play deals with his entreaty to a congregation (represented by the theater audience) to readmit him into the fold, an address that’s really a sermon that turns the tables on audience expectations.
Sometimes Lay (Mark Povinelli) draws the audience into his performance by asking them probing questions. At one point he asks, and I paraphrase, would you risk jail and prison time by publicly voicing your deeply held convictions. Raise you hand if you would he entreats.
Quantum Theatre found a more than adequate actor to perform the strenuous role of Lay in Povinelli. Not only does he have the requisite short stature, but he has the energy and theatrical instincts to revivify his character. His displays of passionate conviction of moral issues are as convincing as his animated fondness for life and adventure is palpable.
Cowritten by Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker, the play is dense with stories, moods and subject matter that the minimalist set by Riccardo Hernandez and Isobel Nicolson, while essential to telling Lay’s tales, doesn’t distract from Povinelli’s dramatic artistry.
The Return of Benjamin Lay, a Quantum Theatre production, is at the is at the Carnegie Library in Braddock, through February 23. For tickets and more information, go to www.quantumtheatre.com.
